Phone lines...

One with a dump truck. Someone with cable TV from his service drop across the drive way I was roaring down raising the bed spreading stone for a few hundred feet. I saw cable but did not stop because making a 10 ton pile halfway down would seriously enrage my boss. I feared my boss more than the poor homeowner's wrath at his cable dying on him. So I took it.

I would scrape under cables many a time here in Arkansas with the mixer truck nosing off road. They yell at me, the louder they yell, the faster I stopped even if it meant seeing the wheels sink a foot into the wet ground... why did I bother.

My house had a cable at 13 feet. We tried time and time again to get them to raise it. But the two poles were 150 feet apart on my land and it was a power cable. I begged. So I ended up ordering up two dump loads of gravel next to that cable on my land and made a pad for my Century tractor. Eh.

 

No phone or power lines, but I did get a low hanging cable TV line that had been illegally jury rigged across a parking lot. Not even considered an "incident" by my company, although in my opinion it should have been. I should have seen it...

 

Caught a telephone cable around a corner store one time when I was a beverage delivery driver my first year in. I had cleared it many times before but that day the trailer took a bounce and caught it on the corner.

They have some low hanging wires out here in South Texas, especially in more lower income areas of the rio grande valley. I've backed my happy ### up a couple of times here recently because of low wires.

Honorable mentions for city driving ######## also include tree branches and right on the corner poles and fire hydrants.

I'd kill for a 48' trailer sometimes.

unloader

 

I think for my state, the minimum height for power lines is supposed to be 16 ft. Anything goes with cable and telephone lines though and I've caught myself stopping just in time when my trailer snagged one of those.... Stand on the catwalk and push the line up and over with a broom stick.

Anything that goes wrong with lines on a public roadway is a free pass for us. If you pull down a line in an alley, we get hit with a preventable accident. ...one reason why I stopped doing deliveries in alleys regardless how much the homeowner begged and pleaded

 

Firehydrants.

I lost a battle with one in my milk hauling days. I dare say Baltimore will want payment for a new hydrant. In any case it was a even loss for the complete set of tire, dual, rim, spoked wheel, torn spring linkage and so forth back there as I jerked that stupid tank off the hydrant that started leaking.

Company shop asked what the hell? I said don't ask. Can you fix? Sure. But it's coming out of pay.

Eh....

 

Once, didn't pull it down. I was delivery food at a school and left thru the ally way in chicago. Saw a wire hang right in the middle and stop. A homeowner was there and said his neighbor did that but wasn't use anymore. So we both swing it back to the neighbor

 

Heck, my record was like 17 in ONE DAY!
I was driving a knuckle boom crane in Queens NYC cleaning up storm debris from hurricane Sandy. Some of the smaller streets it looked like spaghetti strung across the road.
City supervisor said by law they're supposed to be 14', and our rigs were 13'3" at the high point of the boom. Man said just roll on......lol

 

None that I know of lol - I did get that stop sign in West Memphis that one time..

 

I was hauling a gravel crusher up to Christmas Meadows up in the Uinta Mountains one time and there was a small electric motor for one of the conveyor belts on it that was smacking every phone line on that highway up there. Didn't knock any down but there was definetely contact and maybe a stretched wire or two.

Another time I was driving a front load trash truck. Couldn't get backed up an icy driveway so I put the packer blade all the way back and put the arms back to move some weight to the drives. But I didn't see the forks still sticking straight up in the air. Got backed out of there and took off, wiping out the traffic signal lights in front of the fire station.

They say you learn something new everyday..some days the lessons are a little bigger than others....